Friday, December 9, 2016

“I continue to want — and to try — to disintermediate myself from this muddle, edify the corporate
audit and existential process we are in — while also being a
responsible board member, daughter and person,” Chelsea wrote in the 2011
e-mail.

I’ll spend no time on this (it’s like shooting fish in a barrel), but ChelseaClinton's Wikileaks-unearthed email
sentence is about the most pretentious and pathetic thing I’ve ever
read.

I didn’t want to post this during election season (I didn’t post
anything then), but this has been gnawing
at me.

Years ago a friend, a smart, very accomplished person who isn’t
the least bit pretentious, but is
highly insecure, told me how much he liked the word “disintermediate.”I don’t.Hardly anyone understands it and even though it’s easy to figure out, why not just use a more
common expression, “disentangle,” for example?

As far as “edify
the corporate audit and existential
process we are in,” I’ve handled lots of corporate audits and I don’t think the word “edify”
applies or is suitable, grammatically or otherwise, ever.As for the “existential
process we are in,” gag me with a spoon.

Funny that despite
the fact that she apparently holds an Oxford degree in social sciences awarded for a study ofthe Clinton Foundation's work, Ms.
Clinton doesn’t use the Oxford comma.

Thursday, December 8, 2016

“Historically,
TV had been the dominant medium. We all used to wonder why we spent so much
time watching TV. When asked “why TV?,” my answer was always the same ‘TV is the best alternative to
boredom. It's the closest we can come to doing nothing while thinking we are
doing something. It was always our go to way to kill time’".

“Today, our best alternative to boredom
comes from an app. Firing up an app on whatever
device you happen to have in your hand, no matter where in the world you are,
is how we kill time.”

I’m naïve, I must be. Watching
Mark Cuban, the “tech billionaire,” testifying in Congress yesterday in support
of the Time-Warner-ATT merger, I was surprised by the silence – no one
interrupted and called him a pestilent idiot – when he uttered the above
sentiments early in his remarks.

“The best alternative to boredom.” “Go
to way to kill time.”

I’m not a goody two-shoes and I do
enjoy television and other entertainment media. But I can’t regard
Cuban’s comments as anything but an offense to the gift and privilege of being
alive and sentient, whatever your religion or other moral code might be.

I’ve never quoted (as far as I can
recall) Henry David Thoreau, but I think “as if you could kill time without
injuring eternity” (from Walden) is pretty
good and something I can identify with.

Iknew I
thought Mark Cuban was a dope,
but now I know why. Jane likes him on Shark Tank,
though.
.